


a tiny apology

by curiositykilled



Series: pessimistic avengers [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Compliant, Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Spoilers, Gen, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-23
Updated: 2016-05-23
Packaged: 2018-06-10 07:10:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6944887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/curiositykilled/pseuds/curiositykilled
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's no point in breaking free. There's nothing left out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a tiny apology

                  He takes cursory stock of the glass cell:

                  Metal harness.

                  Metal cuffs.

                  Metal leg bands.

                  Standard.

                  He can break it. It’s not a question: they haven’t built something yet to withstand his or Steve’s strength. Probably because they don’t really know it.

                  He doesn’t test the cuffs. He doesn’t need to.

                  There’s little point, anyway. He knew he was on borrowed time, stealing a couple years’ respite from the simple reality: he’s a weapon, and weapons don’t get to run away. He’s not sure what he’d be running for, anyway. A life? It’s a lot to ask.

                  Whatever Steve wishes, he knows the truth. Bucky Barnes and the Winter Soldier are and always will be intrinsically connected. It wasn’t his mind who killed those people, but it was his hands, his sniper’s eye, his steel-toed boots. Steve can separate them, can dissect them neatly down the line to say which is which. He did it all the time in Brooklyn, in Europe – here’s the sergeant with the bloodred hands, but here’s the boy from Brooklyn with a ladykiller smile.

                  The rest of the world doesn’t quite have Steve’s type of vision. He’s thought on it before, because he doesn’t, really, understand how Steve can do it. How he can just keep on caring and caring and caring when Bucky’s caked in blood and grime deeper than an unmarked grave.

                  Then, he catches Steve looking back once more, and he knows that look. Not from an apartment in Brooklyn in 1925, not from a base in Italy in 1943. He knows it from a burning helicarrier in 2014. He knows it from the feeling on his own face.

                  So maybe he does know what he was running for. A life, maybe. This, certainly: to protect the one thing he can’t live without. Because he knows, has known, that for all Steve’s gold-burnished armor, Bucky is his unholy heel, and the arrow’s been aimed for a long time.

It’s fate, it’s destiny, it’s gravity. It doesn’t matter how they get there, in the end, they’re always going to drown. They’re each other’s catastrophe.

                  The psychologist walks in, starts droning on. Bucky takes a deep breath, another. He can’t fix this. He can’t undo what’s been done. But he knows Steve, knows he’s surely listening, watching, somewhere. He can’t take back what’s already happened, but maybe he can give him this one thing, this tiny apology.

                  “My name is Bucky,” he says.

                 

**Author's Note:**

> whee I love Bucky Barnes! 
> 
> I found his switch from being super closed-off in the apartment and containment thing to being open and Bucky-ish post-helicopter really interesting. Also how, in the containment thingie, he didn't look scared or angry or anything - just resigned.
> 
>  
> 
> [tumblr](http://www.curiosity-killed.tumblr.com)


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